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Chinese Debate Aiding Strangers After Toddler’s Critical Injury By J. DAVID GOODMAN The accident is terrible to watch. A toddler, roughly 2 years old, walks absent-mindedly down a narrow street in a market district of Foshan, a large city in southern China, when she is hit by a large white van. The van stops with the child underneath — the driver apparently only aware at that point of what might have happened — but then continues forward, the rear wheels crushing the girl a second time. Closed-circuit camera footage of the horrible accident, which appears to have occurred on Thursday, has been viewed more than a half-million times in China. But it was the response of many Chinese — who walked, drove or bicycled past the listless body of the toddler lying in a busy urban street — that has created an uproar and touched off a debate in China about the proper response of passers-by to tragic accidents. [Warning: Video of the accident and its aftermath is extremely disturbing.] The front page of China’s Guangzhou Daily featured the grief-stricken parents of the girl. The story rocketed to the top of Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, over the weekend, Shanghaiist reported. Many saw in the casual disregard of those who did not help a symbol of an almost Hobbesian state of struggle, while others argued that Good Samaritans have been punished in the past for intervening in such episodes. “This society is seriously ill. Even cats and dogs shouldn’t be treated so heartlessly,” one person posted to Sina Weibo, Agence-France Presse reported. Another poster, named Johnny Yao andquoted by The Daily Telegraph, writes: “Everyone is praising the rubbish-collecting granny for helping, but isn’t it normal to help someone who is wounded or dying? This just shows how abnormal is the moral situation in this society! The sad Chinese, poor China, are we even rescuable?” For several minutes the child writhes on the ground as more than a dozen people pass by. Some on scooters stop and